Rains crashed down on many western parts of the UK yesterday and by a quirk of fate this time 200 years ago was also astonishingly wet. It was summed up gloriously by John Keats: “It is impossible to live in a country which is continually under hatches . . . Rain! Rain! Rain!”

At the time Keats was staying in Teignmouth, Devon. He arrived there on March 5 after a horrendous coach journey from London during a violent storm. “I escaped being blown over and blown under & trees & house[s] being toppled on me,” he wrote to his friend John Hamilton Reynolds. He was, indeed, lucky to be alive as the storm tore across southern Britain and sent tiles flying off roofs, brought chimneys…